3 years later, Morales waits

Saturday

Feb 21, 2009 at 12:01 AMFeb 21, 2009 at 6:24 AM

STOCKTON - On Feb. 21, 2006, Barbara Christian waited at home in rural Sacramento County for a phone call saying it was over, that justice for the 1981 rape and murder of her teenage daughter, Terri Lynn Winchell, had finally been carried out.

Scott Smith

STOCKTON - On Feb. 21, 2006, Barbara Christian waited at home in rural Sacramento County for a phone call saying it was over, that justice for the 1981 rape and murder of her teenage daughter, Terri Lynn Winchell, had finally been carried out.

Some 100 miles away at San Quentin State Prison, Michael Angelo Morales waited in a cell near the execution chamber to be escorted to his death. The Stockton man thought it was his turn each time a jailer's keys jingled.

Neither of their expectations came true. In a flurry of last-minute appeals, Morales' attorneys won a delay, indefinitely halting his and all other California executions.

Today marks three years since the stay. The fate of Morales, now 49, still hangs in the balance with chances of his execution at least a year away. State prison officials say they are about to launch another attempt to right their execution procedure.

Christian said she's done waiting for earthly justice.

"I've just given up on it," she said in a phone interview this week. "Let God deal with him."

Morales was condemned to die for murdering Winchell, a 17-year-old Tokay High School senior, 28 years ago. He strangled, bludgeoned with a hammer, stabbed and raped her before leaving her half-nude body in a muddy Acampo vineyard.

Morales' looming execution has since become a landmark case that reignited the debate over how California - with the nation's most populous death row - should carry out lethal injection while not causing the inmate excruciating pain.

State officials in the past three years have run into repeated obstacles in their attempt to revive California's capital punishment and execute Morales.

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose, who is shepherding the case, found the state's execution procedure unconstitutional. He held a weeklong hearing that pulled back the curtain on previous executions to reveal what he called a "broken" system.

Fogel found the execution team was ill trained, improperly mixed lethal drugs and had to work in a dimly lit gas chamber that was remodeled for lethal injections.

Most recently, the state suffered a blow in Marin County amid a bureaucratic tangle. A Superior Court judge there sided with Morales, saying the corrections officials failed to open up their revised lethal injection procedure for public comment as required by law.

Seth Unger, a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman, said the state is preparing to do that right now. It is the quicker route rather than to continue appealing the Marin judge's ruling.

Under the Administrative Procedures Act, the CDCR is one of about 300 agencies that has to publish rule changes and take comment for one or more periods before adopting a new rule. The entire process takes up to a year.

The state's revised lethal injection procedure that will go up for public review consists of the same three drugs used in previous executions - thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride - but in different doses.

It's hard to say how long the public review process will actually take, said Unger, adding that there is also a chance the California Supreme Court could take up Morales' Marin case, he said.

"It could be six months or it could be a year," Unger said. "It's really hard to estimate."

After that, Morales' case then has to return to Fogel's San Jose courtroom, where the federal judge will decide if the state brought its method of lethal injection up to constitutional standards.

San Francisco attorney John Grele, who successfully derailed Morales' scheduled execution three years ago, said the Stockton man's constitutional argument was the first of several condemned inmates to gain traction in California.

"Obviously there was something seriously wrong," Grele said. "The question now is whether or not the state can fix it and has fixed it."

Grele said his goal is to force the state into complying with the constitutional protection from cruel and unusual punishment and meet the "standards of human decency" in carrying out executions.

For her part, Christian on holidays still drives down to her daughter's grave at Lodi's Cherokee Memorial Park. She places pink and red roses near the headstone, a symbol of her daughter's beauty, she said.

For 25 years, Christian waited for Morales' execution, which "crashed" that night in 2006, she said. The experience caused painful memories to flood back into her life. She doesn't want to go through that again, she said.

"What's that say for the other mothers and fathers who have their child's murderer on death row, too?" she said. "I'm not the only one suffering."